Urge Senator Plett and his fellow Senators to vote on “transgender” Bill C-16 by signing this petition. Please help transgender people in their fight to be recognized under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For the 100 or so transgender women who are currently incarcerated in men’s prisons in Canada, and who are under the constant threat of being sexually abused, having Bill C-16 passed by the Senate and written into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would allow them to be moved to the relative safety of women’s prisons.

There is reportedly a small group of transphobic senators who are stalling this bill in the senate, hoping that by stalling a vote they can kill the bill. The main culprit is reportedly Senator Don Plett, a conservative from Manitoba and the longest serving president of a conservative party in Canadian history. The argument from people such as Plett is that little girls should be kept safe in school washrooms.

“All the data and all the evidence shows protecting transgender people only increases public safety,” Chase Strangio, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project and a transgender man. He said there is an implication in certain laws “that fundamentally people just don’t think of transgender people as humans, and they try to erase trans people from existence.”

According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey (trans survey), the largest survey ever conducted on transgender issues, with 27, 715 respondents, more than three-quarters (77%) of those who were out or perceived as transgender at some point between Kindergarten and Grade 12 (K–12) experienced some form of mistreatment, such as being verbally harassed, prohibited from dressing according to their gender identity, disciplined more harshly, or physically or sexually assaulted because people thought they were transgender. Fifty-four percent (54%) of those who were out or perceived as transgender in K–12 were verbally harassed, nearly one-quarter (24%) were physically attacked, and 13% were sexually assaulted in K–12 because of being transgender. Seventeen percent (17%) faced such severe mistreatment as a transgender person that they left a K–12 school. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of people who were out or perceived as transgender in college or vocational school were verbally, physically, or sexually harassed.